The Legalities of Class III Firearms

Firing a .308 bolt action with a suppressor by AWC. The suppressor keeps muzzle flash and sound signature to a minimum, making it an asset in tactical operations.

Forty-five states allow legally registered machine guns. These firearms are available to civilians if they were manufactured and registered before the magic date in May, 1986. They are called transferable machine guns. All the usual requirements for gun ownership, and then some, apply.

Actually the form that needs to be filled out has similar questions that are on the Form 4473 that you fill out when purchasing a new gun. There is a part on the form where the application needs to be signed by the chief law enforcement official of the area in which you will keep the gun. This is usually not a problem unless possession violates some ordinance or local law.

Before purchasing or possessing any machine gun or buying or building a silencer, apply for and have the ATF registration and tax stamp for the equipment in hand.

But let’s be specific here and use the proper terms. Select-fire weapons are guns that can fire more than one round with one pull of the trigger. Some select-fire weapons will continue firing until the magazine is empty or the trigger is released and some have the ability to limit the number of rounds fired each time the trigger is pulled, as in the three-shot burst configurations.

All this has been summed up by our phraseology culture as a machine gun and deemed not necessary for private citizens by the anti-gun crowd.

The same goes for the suppressor. This technology allows us to reduce the noise of firearms so that we may shoot without hearing protection and noise to bother our neighbors. But somewhere along the line the “silencer” became an evil assassin’s tool.

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Another way of purchasing these items is by using a gun trust. A gun trust can solve many of the problem of individual ownership and when your CLEO is reluctant to sign. For more information on gun trusts and the legality of the NFA firearms in your state check out http://www.GunTrustLawyer.com/